The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam Webinar Diplomacy: echo chambers, open offices, or dialogic conversations?

In the past two years webinars on the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) proliferated, both as a contingent response to lockdown and travel restrictions, but also as a proactive strategy by diplomats, journalists, and researchers to promote their own views, agenda and representations about the dam. This study aims at contributing to debates on discursive water diplomacy and digital diplomacy, asking under which conditions can these webinars create a space for constructive (dialogic) conversation and conflict transformation. Relying on coding and analysis of a sample of webinars on the GERD organized between July 2020 and October 2021, as well as on semi-structured interviews to webinars’ organizers and speakers, the study sketches a typology of webinars – echo chambers, open offices, dialogic conversations – to elicit a reflection within the academic community on how we should engage in and contribute to these types of events in the “new normal” of a (post)lockdown world.